My situational awareness project

Category Archives: Administrative

I am currently working on some updates to strengthen the connection between facebook and this site. Please be patient with any double posts or other strange traffic as I work and test different elements of this update.

I have given myself a couple of weeks to think about the future of this site and I think that since most of the services run by themselves for the most part and I just add content occasionally, I will keep this site going. I will be adding content and expand my focus area to include Riley County and most of the I70 corridor in NE Kansas by default.

I will be working on some re-branding to reflect this additional content. I do like the concept of a virtual situation room, so as to not box myself in too much I think that I will just re-brand the site as Doug’s Situation Room.

I have decided that I will be taking this site and the related social media sites down in the near future. I was using this site as a test bed for passing emergency management related information to the public. I have moved on from Jefferson County and have taken a job in the fire service outside of Jefferson County. Although this site is not a huge financial burden to me, it is a personal expense that is very hard to justify now.

I am often asked what I am monitoring during a weather event or what I use to post the images, so I decided to try and explain my setup.

I am currently running Storm Lab radar software on one machine that uploads to to the web server for the JF-KS Radar. That radar is in composite mode with the storm motion indicators with hail and meso icons activated and I use it to get a general idea of where the cells are and where they are going. What you see on the JF-KS Radar page is what I’m watching on that screen. Interwarn is also running on that machine pulling in the EMWIN data stream from the NWS. The last program running on the 1st machine is Pidgin chat-room software that is logged into NWSCHAT giving me real time communications with the Topeka NWS office and local TV meteorologist.

My main machine is usually logged into facebook to the Situation Room page using my Firefox browser. I have yet to find a 3rd party tool to use with facebook that works the way I need it to, so I have to use the web application. On another tab I am usually on the Storm Prediction Center Page looking at the Mesoanalysis. Another tab I am running is the back end of this site. I am also usually bouncing around on the browser looking at a vast array of products from the NWS. I run GR level 2 Analyst radar software on my main machine also, that is what produces the volume scans and radar captures that I post to this site and facebook page.

On my third machine I am running a copy of GR Level 3 software with a Spotter Network overlay that I use to watch streaming video from chasers. I also run Tweetdeck on the 3rd machine to monitor Twitter post for more ground truth information and to access all of my twitter accounts at the same time.

I have all 3 machine connected together using Synergy so I only have to use one keyboard and mouse.

I also run a Windows Home Server in the background that ties everything together with automatic backups and remote access so that I can get to my files from anywhere with internet access.

In addition to this I have 4 radio transceivers and 5 scanners running for monitoring and communicating. The TV is usually going also watching for any updates from the TV stations. I’ll save the radio details for another post.

I have most of this setup duplicated using 3 laptop computers, a Mifi hotspot and portable radios that I carry with me most of the time so that I can continue to monitor the current situation no matter where I am at.

Worse case scenario, I have apps loaded on my smartphone that will facilitate most of these functions, but it is slower and harder to keep up with a rapidly developing situation using the phone.

This setup is constantly evolving as I try to keep up with new technology and software packages out there.

The are issues with the Jf-Ks situation room Facebook page that is not allowing me to post updates to the page right now. We are working through these issues and hopefully they will be resolved shortly.

The website transition from k0sds.com to jf-ks.com has been completed. Jfksem.com is still pointing to this site so all previous links should still work. I will be expanding the content in the future and plan on adding more static pages as time allows. In the mean time check out the area news page and area sports pages that I have built. They are pulling feeds from the local media outlets in and around Jefferson County. Clicking on the article titles will take you to the full article on their host site. I plan on doing the same thing with a national news feed in the near future.

I have also spiced up the layout a bit, hopefully it makes the site a little better to look at. I would rather spend the time I do have to work on this focusing on good relevant content and less on the graphics.

Thank you for your patience while I was making the changes and let me know what you think.

I have created k0sds.com as a separate site to use as more of a personal page where I can post my opinions and thoughts. My thoughts for this site continues to be more of a factual based awareness tool.

The k0sds blog has been retired… I am working on a concept to provide a flexible, timely information portal targeted to people with interests in and around Jefferson County, Kansas. A large component of this concept involves discover-ability by the major search engines. To be able to do that I need to broaden the focus of this site a bit. I am re-branding the site the JF-KS Situation Room to better reflect the direction this project is going and to facilitate the required changes. This weekend the base address for this site will change to JF-KS.com. The current content will remain, I will end up only expanding it from here.

My hope is to have the transition to JF-KS.com completed with plenty of time left to get weather information out for the snow this weekend.

K0sds.com and jfksem.com will both redirect to this new site, so hopefully all links will still work. I plan on leaving the redirects in place for a while so the web crawlers (search engines) catch all of the changes. After that, who knows.